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Friday, November 26th, 2004

(via CyberJournalist.net)
Aggregation is having and will continue to have some major effects on
the Web, and one of them I’ve been thinking about lately is the decline
of the homepage. I mean I can probably count on two hands that number
of sites I’ve actually visited in the last week, all because of they
way I can aggregate the content in Bloglines.

Aggregators are promoting a shift in the control of content. They’re
challenging the idea that we as designers control public access to
information in our domains, that users must view things in the way we
prescribe, and that our hierarchy is best to present our content. This
change is also suggesting that we need the help of others to market our
own ideas. It is plausible that another’s approach to our information
may be working better than our own.

I
still see a lot of people talking about teachers creating their own
homepages to put up course information or homwork, and I wonder why
would they do that these days? Why wouldn’t they just start a blog with
an out of the box template that will satisfy the few people who might
actually visit the site but has the built-in RSS feed to push the
important content to the relevant audiences? These days, it’s the
information, stupid. I’m much more interested in how many people read
my feed than visit my page.

Weblogs are a tool that I think bridges the divide between Prensky’s digital natives and digital immigrants,
’cause the immigrants can put a blog to good use without a lot of
expertise. I think we’re at the point where teaching them HTML and FTP
and all those other acronyms doesn’t do much to add to the fluency they
need to put the read/write Web to work.

Jack McLeod is more than “moving molecules” as a friend of mine used to say. He’s moving mountains. Check out this post where he talks about how he’s hoping to implement blogs at his school.

Jeff [his principal] is ready to get the kids blogging. The global audience did it. Authentic publishing. Now that’s why we have the Internet. It’s not for surfing or replacing the library, it’s for sharing with the world. The upshot is that I’m going to apply for a leave to get the ball rolling…Jeff is a great leader that gets stuck dealing with discipline and attendance. Today was a chance to talk. I mentioned my rant about throwing away all of our current curriculum and starting to teach kids how to manage information. He’s there. That’s the read-write web isn’t it?

He’s adding Bloglines and Furl and Firefox to all of the classroom computers as well. How cool is that?